Open Source Portal Toolkit for Salesforce Released

September 25 2006, Portland OR - Cubic Compass Software (CCS), a provider of enterprise portal software, today announced the availability of an open source portal toolkit for salesforce.com's suite of on-demand CRM applications. The portal is tightly integrated with Salesforce to give Sales, Marketing, and Support professionals a view of all customer interactions online within Salesforce and provides their customers with self-service access to account information.

"Our goal was to take a top-down approach to implementing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA ) by addressing several key business challenges that every salesforce.com customer faces when integrating their web site with Salesforce, such as how to process web leads, make decisions based on web interactions, offer customer self-service applications, and make it easy to search and find information on a web site," said Mike Leach, CEO of Cubic Compass Software.

The portal toolkit is based on Microsoft's .NET 2.0 technology. A report from Forrester (1) shows that 56% of enterprises have adopted .NET as their primary development platform.

"Cubic Compass Software incorporates several security, performance, and integration best practices into this portal toolkit," said Adam Gross, vice president, developer marketing, salesforce.com . "This allows organizations to spend more time delivering business value through their Web site and less time on integration and deployment."

Programming skills are not required to customize the portal since most content management and Salesforce integration features are managed through a web-based Portal Explorer. Portal implementations that publish Salesforce custom objects or integrate with add-on modules do require Visual Basic .NET or C# programming skills. CCS offers additional tools and consulting to help organizations publishing custom objects.

The portal toolkit is released under the open source BSD license and may be downloaded at http://www.cubiccompass.com/salesforce-portal.aspx . The open source license gives developers the ability to download and customize the portal source code to their organization's specific needs and requirements. AppExchange partners may use the portal toolkit as a platform for delivering hosted services integrated with Salesforce.
 
Cubic Compass offers annual software support subscriptions, technical support, training, and consulting services in support of the portal software. Software and support subscriptions start at $599 per year.

Michael Leach, Cubic Compass CEO, will be demonstrating the portal at Salesforce's User conference in the session entitled "Portals and Web Sites Powered by the AppExchange" on October 11, 2006 at 10:15am.

Hosted portal solutions are offered by CCS at www.i-dialogue.com.
 

References: 
(1) "The State of Technology Adoption",  Nicholas Wilkoff, Forester Research, May 5, 2004
http://www.cubiccompass.com/docs/Forrester_State_of_Technology_Adoption.pdf  

About Cubic Compass Software (CCS)

Cubic Compass Software, located in Portland, OR, provides open source portal software and services that help organizations interact with their customers online and integrate their customer and partner facing web applications with CRM, ERP, and legacy systems. CCS is the primary developer of the .NET Portal  Toolkit for Salesforce.com and the suite of hosted i-Dialogue for AppExchange applications found at www.i-dialogue.com.

CCS has been developing award winning portal solutions since 2001. For more information, please visit http://www.cubiccompass.com, email info@cubiccompass.com or call 503-245-7654.   


For More Information
http://www.cubiccompass.com/salesforce-portal.aspx

New in i-Dialogue v 6.4.7 is a feature called "Actionable Events".

Actionable Events (AEs) are web interactions that automatically trigger follow-up tasks in Salesforce. For example, a web lead may subscribe to a newsletter and passively monitor emails for several months. Then one day the Lead responds to a newsletter by clicking on a link to a white paper and does some serious research on the web site.

The next day a Sales rep calls the Lead and asks them if they can answer any questions regarding a particular product. The customer will think the sales reps timing is perfect and relevant.

This scenario is accomplished by editing an i-Dialogue portal object in Salesforce and selecting the "All Download Events Are Actionable" checkbox and defining the trigger count and default Task fields.

i-Dialogue will auto-create and dynamically assign tasks for each Lead or Contacts based on OwnerId.

Connect OnDemand is a great site for networking with other Salesforce Customers and Partners that will be attending the Dreamforce conference.

Click on the "Join Me@ConnectOnDemand" image below for more information.

 

This won't be formally announced until just before Dreamforce, but here's an exclusive to Diablogue readers:

i-Dialogue Chat for AppExchange integrates with any web site to enable instant messaging between customers and Salesforce users. You can check out a 2 minute video here.

More info on the Salesforce.com Portal Toolkit is now available as it moves into public beta.

Mike Leach, from i-Dialogue, will be presenting at Dreamforce October 8-11, 2006. Stop by the Developers Lounge after the "Building Portals and Web Sites with AppExchange" session to discuss your web-Salesforce integration needs, or just say hello.

A business web desktop, new calendar, and reminders are just a few of the new features being revealed over at SFDC's idea web site.

Oh, BTW You can also vote for your favorite Winter '07 logo.

Here's my favorite